Menopause: A developmental stage, not a deficiency disease.

Proposes the view that menopause is a unique stage of development within the midlife period of reconstruction. Midlife women in therapy are viewed as a special sample of midlife women in general, and therapists are challenged to go beyond the current medical conception of menopause as a "deficiency disease." Results are reported from a survey of 157 psychotherapists concerning beliefs and clinical behaviors relating to menopause. Reflecting society's negative social construction of menopause, the data indicate that both therapists and their menopausal patients are hesitant to discuss menopause. Therapists report that most women who do discuss menopause in psychotherapy say that menopause means "getting old." The unexpected ambivalence of therapists regarding discussion of menopausal issues is analyzed in terms of countertransference issues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Integrating DCS/PLC systems with MAP

MAP has been used to successfully integrate distributed control system (DCS) products with programmable logic controllers (PLC). Performance levels have been better than expected especially when using the three-layer Mini-MAP protocol. Functionality and the performance levels actually achieved in a multivendor integration are described.     

In Search of Archetypes in Crisis Management

Despite their unstable nature, crises are frequently defined as opportunities for managers to make strategic decisions in terms of bringing new configurations into play. According to this perspective, research is undertaken to discover new forms taken on by organisations during times of crisis. Relying on the experience of Local Centres of Community Services in Quebec during the ice storm of 1998, the results of this research permitted us to demonstrate three archetypes of crisis management collectivists, integrators and reactive types, each with the specific characteristics and imperatives as defined by Miller (1987) . These consist of leadership, strategies, structures and environments. The research also permitted us to establish participants' appreciation of the performance of their organisation and of the managers dealt with the crisis. Finally, we will discuss the importance of applying theories of configuration in the field of crisis management and several promising areas of research in this field.     

Effective procedures and computable functions

Horsten and Roelants have raised a number of important questions about my analysis of effective procedures and my evaluation of the Church-Turing thesis. They suggest that, on my account, effective procedures cannot enter the mathematical world because they have a built-in component of causality, and, hence, that my arguments against the Church-Turing thesis miss the mark. Unfortunately, however, their reasoning is based upon a number of misunderstandings. Effective mundane procedures do not, on my view, provide an analysis of ourgeneral concept of an effective procedure; mundane procedures and Turing machine procedures are different kinds of procedure. Moreover, the same sequence ofparticular physical action can realize both a mundane procedure and a Turing machine procedure; it is sequences of particular physical actions, not mundane procedures, which enter the world of mathematics. I conclude by discussing whether genuinely continuous physical processes can enter the world of real numbers and compute real-valued functions. I argue that the same kind of correspondence assumptions that are made between non-numerical structures and the natural numbers, in the case of Turing machines and personal computers, can be made in the case of genuinely continuous, physical processes and the real numbers.     

A genetic animal model of human neocortical heterotopia associated with seizures

Malformations of the human neocortex are commonly associated with developmental delays, mental retardation, and epilepsy. This study describes a novel neurologically mutant rat exhibiting a forebrain anomaly resembling the human neuronal migration disorder of double cortex. This mutant displays a telencephalic internal structural heterotopia (tish) that is inherited in an autosomal recessive manner. The bilateral heterotopia is prominent below the frontal and parietal neocortices but is rarely observed in temporal neocortex. Neurons in the heterotopia exhibit neocortical-like morphologies and send typical projections to subcortical sites; however, characteristic lamination and radial orientation are disturbed in the heterotopia. The period of neurogenesis during which cells in the heterotopia are generated is the same as in the normotopic neocortex; however, the cells in the heterotopia exhibit a "rim-to-core" neurogenetic pattern rather than the characteristic "inside-out" pattern observed in normotopic neocortex. Similar to the human syndrome of double cortex, some of the animals with the tish phenotype exhibit spontaneous recurrent electrographic and behavioral seizures. The tish rat is a unique neurological mutant that shares several features with a human cortical malformation associated with epilepsy. On the basis of its regional connectivity, histological composition, and period of neurogenesis, the heterotopic region in the tish rat is neocortical in nature. This neurological mutant represents a novel model system for investigating mechanisms of aberrant neocortical development and is likely to provide insights into the cellular and molecular events contributing to seizure development in dysplastic neocortex.     

Declining phosphorus as a potential driver for the onset of Didymosphenia geminata mats in North American rivers

Didymosphenia geminata is a stalk‐forming diatom capable of creating thick benthic mats in low‐nutrient streams. There are two hypotheses to explain the rapid worldwide increase in occurrence of nuisance D. geminata mats: (a) Cells are spread among rivers and across broad ecoregions through natural and anthropogenic vectors, or (2) pre‐existing D. geminata populations are forming mats in response to changing environmental conditions within the habitat. Low phosphorus (P) concentrations are a major trigger for stalk production by D. geminata cells. Although the environmental change hypothesis is gaining support among researchers, long‐term data sets demonstrating declining P concentrations prior to reported mat formation have been essentially absent from the literature. Here, we present long‐term datasets for two case studies for which long‐term P and D. geminata data coincide: the Matapedia River in Eastern Canada and the Kootenai River below Libby Dam in Montana, United States. Both rivers had declining P levels over time. However, there was a 2‐ and 20‐year lag time, respectively, between mat development and reaching the previously proposed average 2 μg/L soluble reactive P threshold for development. Although the Matapedia River provides some support of the environmental change hypothesis, the Kootenai River data set suggests other environmental factors may play a role in mat development. The data presented do not rule out the environmental change hypothesis but do suggest there may be conditions in addition to low P that must be met for mats to form and the environmental change hypothesis can likely be refined to include more parameters to better understand and mitigate the influence of mats.     

Insights from NMR Spectroscopy into the Conformational Properties of Man‐9 and Its Recognition by Two HIV Binding Proteins

Man₉GlcNAc₂ (Man‐9) present at the surface of HIV makes up the binding sites of several HIV‐neutralizing agents and the mammalian lectin DC‐SIGN, which is involved in cellular immunity and trans‐infections. We describe the conformational properties of Man‐9 in its free state and when bound by the HIV entry‐inhibitor protein microvirin (MVN), and define the minimum epitopes of both MVN and DC‐SIGN by using NMR spectroscopy. To facilitate the implementation of 3D ¹³C‐edited spectra to deconvolute spectral overlap and to determine the solution structure of Man‐9, we developed a robust expression system for the production of ¹³C,¹⁵N‐labeled glycans in mammalian cells. The studies reveal that Man‐9 interacts with HIV‐binding proteins through distinct epitopes and adopts diverse conformations in the bound state. In combination with molecular dynamics simulations we observed receptor‐bound conformations to be sampled by Man‐9 in the free state, thus suggesting a conformational selection mechanism for diverse recognition.